As an English actress, you have to don a bonnet at some point. This was my time,” says Emily Blunt. Queen Victoria is a long way from the scene-stealing bitchery and Louboutins of The Devil Wears Prada. Yet Blunt, 26, is equally at home in corsets, crinoline, and starchy repression. In The Young Victoria, she plays the queen from her teenage years—she assumed Britain’s throne at 18—through the first years of her marriage to Prince Albert, played dashingly by Rupert Friend, another rising British star. “There was a tsunami of women behind me wanting the role, so I sort of bullied myself in,” says Blunt. “Many period films are very arch and stiff, and I don’t respond to the characters. If I see ‘the rebellious English rose’ in stage directions, I’m already bored,” she adds. “But this was a girl who was willing to expose herself to the world. That was what was different for me.” – from NYMag